Trick Taking Card Games

A trick-taking game has three defining features. First, play goes in rounds called tricks, and each player puts exactly one card into each trick. Second, a fixed rule decides which card wins the trick, and its player takes all the cards in it. Third, the result depends on how many tricks you took or on what they contain.

That is the whole definition, and it rules out a lot. Rummy games are about collecting sets from a draw pile. Shedding games like Crazy Eights and Uno are about getting rid of your cards and have no tricks at all. Blackjack and Poker are betting games against a house or a pot. Solitaire has no opponents. However popular they are, none of these belongs to the family.

The family is old. Playing cards are first mentioned in Europe in Spain in 1371. Karnöffel, recorded in 1426 in the Bavarian town of Nördlingen, is the oldest known game with privileged cards that beat the others, although they did not yet form a whole trump suit. Trumps in that full sense arrived in Italy in the fifteenth century, with the special cards called trionfi that tarot packs still carry. How exactly one game led to the next is a story full of gaps, so treat any tidy single origin story with caution.

One player leads: they play the first card of the trick and so set the suit led. Every other player, in turn, must follow suit, playing a card of that same suit, if they hold one. This duty is the most important rule in the family, because it stops the game from being a simple contest of who was dealt the highest cards. It forces you to spend cards you would rather keep.

A player with no card of the led suit is void in it and may play anything. What they choose is one of the most revealing moves in any trick-taking game: usually they either win the trick with a trump or throw away something worthless, and both choices tell anyone paying attention a great deal about their hand.

The highest card of the suit led wins the trick, unless someone has played a trump, in which case the highest trump wins. The winner leads the next trick, so winning is not a pure gain: it also means you have to open the next one, and being on lead at the wrong moment is a real liability in many games. Play continues until every hand is empty.

A trump is a card that beats any card of any other suit, whatever its rank. The two of the trump suit outranks the ace of everything else. Games differ enormously in how the trump suit is chosen, and the method tells you a lot about a game's character.

Some games fix it permanently. Spades is the obvious case: spades are trump every deal, forever, which removes a whole decision and makes the game quicker to learn. Some games turn a card up: Whist traditionally exposes the dealer's last card, and Euchre and Oh Hell turn an upcard. Some games auction it: in Bridge and Tarneeb the winner of the bidding names trump, so the right to choose is itself a prize worth fighting over.

And some games have no trump at all. Hearts never has one. Bridge allows notrump contracts, which are usually the highest-scoring and hardest to play, because nothing can stop a long suit once the opponents get in. Play some deals with trumps and some without, and you learn what trumps are really for: they let a hand that is short in a suit fight back against one that is long in it.

Games also differ on whether you may lead a trump and whether you must play one. Spades forbids leading a spade until spades are broken by being played on a trick where someone was void, which stops the first leader from pulling out everyone's trumps straight away. Callbreak and Belote push the other way: you must trump when you are void, and often must beat the current best card if you can.

In a plain-trick game the only thing that matters is how many tricks you won. The cards inside them are irrelevant: a trick made of the two of clubs and three other low cards counts exactly the same as one holding four aces. It is the most approachable branch of the family.

Whist is the ancestor: no bidding, thirteen tricks, one point for each trick beyond six. Bridge is the elaborate descendant, adding an auction, notrump contracts, a dummy hand and doubling, but still counting nothing but tricks. Spades sits between them, with a fixed trump suit and a simple numeric bid, ten points per bid trick made and a bag penalty for overshooting. Euchre uses a short deck and five-trick hands, with the bowers reshuffling the trump suit's order. Tarneeb, Callbreak and Oh Hell are all plain-trick games with different bidding rules bolted on.

The skill that defines this branch is estimating: looking at a hand and predicting how many tricks it is worth. Then comes the technique of actually delivering that number, which usually means managing your trump length, timing when you take the lead and knowing when to lose a trick on purpose.

In a point-trick game the cards themselves carry values, and you count the value of what you capture rather than the number of piles. That changes which cards are good, often dramatically, and it means one trick late in the hand can be worth more than several earlier ones put together.

Belote is a clean example: aces are worth eleven and tens ten, but in the trump suit the jack is worth twenty and the nine fourteen, so the ranking inside trump is completely different from outside it. Skat, Germany's national card game, and Sheepshead use a similar structure in which jacks are permanent top trumps. Pinochle adds a melding phase where combinations held in hand score before a card is played. French Tarot uses a 78-card pack with a 21-card permanent trump suit and counts card points in halves.

Point-trick games are usually harder than they look. Winning a trick can be a mistake if it costs you a valuable card, and you have to keep a rough running total of the points captured instead of just counting piles. The reward is a much richer set of decisions in every trick.

Evasion games, sometimes called reverse or negative games, flip the goal: you are trying not to take tricks, or not to take particular cards. Hearts is the standard example: every heart costs a point, the queen of spades costs thirteen, and the lowest score wins. There is no trump suit, because a trump would hand you an escape route, and being trapped is the whole game.

Barbu and its relatives go further, cycling through several negative goals over a session (avoid tricks, avoid queens, avoid the last trick) and mixing in positive contracts. The nil bid in Spades is an evasion contract hidden inside a plain-trick game, which is why a nil hand feels like a completely different sport from an ordinary one.

The skill here is the mirror image of everything else: you want low cards, you fear aces, you count who is void so you know who can be forced to take a trick, and being on lead is often a punishment rather than a reward.

Bidding runs through every branch. Most bidding games reward taking at least your bid, Oh Hell demands exactly your bid, and Spades sits in between, allowing overtricks but quietly taxing them through the bag rule. Whether overtricks are free, taxed or fatal is one of the quickest ways to sum up a game. Partnership is a second axis: Bridge, Whist, Spades, Euchre, Belote, Tarneeb and partnership Pinochle are two against two, which brings the whole craft of signalling through card choice, while Hearts, Oh Hell, Skat and Callbreak are individual games where alliances are informal and short-lived.

Trick-and-draw games form their own subgroup: after each trick, players refill their hands from a stock, and following suit only becomes compulsory once the stock runs out. Sixty-Six is the classic example, and it plays very differently, because the first half of each hand is about building position rather than cashing it in. If you know one branch well, the fastest way to grow is to learn one game from each of the others.